qualities that, well directed, make men great,
not only in books, but action. And, turning from the history of the
imposture to the poems themselves, the young reader bent before their
beauty, literally awed and breathless. How this strange Bristol boy
tamed and mastered his rude and motley materials into a music that
comprehended every tune and key, from the simplest to the sublimest!
He turned back to the biography; he read on; he saw the proud, daring,
mournful spirit alone in the Great City, like himself. He followed its
dismal career, he saw it falling with bruised and soiled wings into
the mire. He turned again to the later works, wrung forth as tasks for
bread,--the satires without moral grandeur, the politics without honest
faith. He shuddered and sickened as he read. True, even here his poet
mind appreciated (what perhaps only poets can) the divine fire that
burned fitfully through that meaner and more sordid fuel,--he still
traced in those crude, hasty, bitter offerings to dire Necessity the
hand of the young giant who had built up the stately verse of Rowley.
But alas! how different from that "mighty line." How all serenity
and joy had fled from these later exercises of art degraded into
journey-work! Then rapidly came on the catastrophe,--the closed doors,
the poison, the suicide, the manuscripts torn by the hands of despairing
wrath, and strewed round the corpse upon the funereal floors. It was
terrible! The spectre of the Titan boy (as described in the notes
written on the margin), with his haughty brow, his cynic smile, his
lustrous eyes, haunted all the night the baffled and solitary child of
song.

CHAPTER XVII.

It will often happen that what ought to turn the human mind from some
peculiar tendency produces the opposite effect. One would think that the
perusal in the newspaper of some crime and capital punishment would
warn away all who had ever meditated the crime, or dreaded the chance
of detection. Yet it is well known to us that many a criminal is made
by pondering over the fate of some predecessor in guilt. There is a
fascination in the Dark and Forbidden, which, strange to say, is only
lost in fiction. No man is more inclined to murder his nephews, or
stifle his wife, after reading "Richard the Third" or "Othello." It is
the reality that is necessary to constitute the danger of contagion.
Now, it was this reality in the fate and life and crowning suicide of
Chatterton that forced itself u